1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for dynamic frequency and voltage scaling for a computer processor.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
In today's computer systems, technological advances for higher performance have led to significantly increased power consumption and heat generation. Besides high energy costs this creates problems in datacenters with existing power delivery and air condition infrastructure limiting the deployment of additional new server systems or requiring expensive infrastructure upgrades. Within a computer system the processors are a key contributor to system power and heat generation. Faster frequencies and correspondingly leakier transistors are one reason for that. In order to limit and even counteract these effects, dynamic power and thermal management systems are getting developed to dynamically manage peak power and implement power saving mechanisms. Due to increasing variability in the manufacturing process of advanced semiconductor chips the upper and lower bounds of voltage/frequency pairs are specific to every chip. In prior art, however, there is no satisfactory mechanism that can characterize processor operating ranges or nominal operating points for each individual processor.